As North Carolina restaurants and hotels navigate the pandemic’s lingering effects on worker expectations and wages—and brace for renewed scrutiny of immigrant workers under Trump’s second administration—the hospitality sector finds itself at a critical juncture.
Amid these shifting dynamics, Lynn Minges will conclude her 13-year tenure as president and CEO of the North Carolina Restaurant & Lodging Association (NCRLA) at the end of this year.
Like trade associations across the country, the NCRLA primarily advocates for business interests, championing policies that benefit owners while maintaining that a thriving industry ultimately improves conditions for workers as well. This relationship raises questions about whose interests truly prevail when industry groups influence labor policies and workplace regulations.
Throughout Minges’ time at the NCRLA, North Carolina has kept the federal minimum wage of $7.25 and the tipped minimum of $2.13—some of the lowest wage floors in the nation. While many hospitality workers now earn more due to labor shortages, these statutory minimums remain unchanged despite years of worker advocacy for increases.
As Minges’ tenure winds down, I sat down with her to discuss these tensions, her legacy, and what challenges await her yet-to-be-named successor.
Which pieces of North Carolina legislation have had the greatest impact on the hospitality industry during your tenure at the NCRLA?
We’ve had a lot of success through the years. As I think back about my 13-year career, [one] of the things I’m proudest of was the passage of the Brunch Bill. I think it was 2017 that we passed the Brunch Bill in North Carolina, which allowed both residents and visitors to purchase alcohol before noon on Sunday.
That was a big, big piece of legislation, a big deal for us, because, way back to Prohibition, we had not been able to serve alcohol in North Carolina until noon. Visitors come into our state frequently [and] dine out. They go to watch a football game that starts with kickoff at noon. They want that beer in front of them. Or they go out to brunch at a nice restaurant. They want a mimosa or Bloody Mary with that brunch, but they were not able to get that.
We were successful in getting that championed and across the finish line. I think the reason that one was so much fun is that the general public got behind it. They were like, “Wow, that didn’t make any sense that we can’t serve alcohol before noon.” And they started talking about it, and policymakers were like, “Yeah, you’re right. That kind of doesn’t make a lot of sense.” So we were able to get that done.
Then during COVID, we had so many issues. Restaurants were shut down for eight weeks, and when we were allowed to reopen, it was with a lot of restrictions: tables ten feet apart, no more than ten people at a single table, mask mandates requiring masks in the restaurant or hotel until you were away from other people. There were distancing requirements. In the early days, there were strict protocols for wiping down surfaces and those kinds of things.
I, along with the team and members across the state, worked very hard on reopening guidance so we could operate responsibly during COVID. We launched a training initiative, Count on Me NC, that trained hospitality workers in North Carolina. I won’t say we trained them all, but we encouraged businesses to train their employees.
Perhaps the greatest moment came when the North Carolina General Assembly awarded a $500 million fund to provide grants to restaurants and hotels that had seen declines in their business revenue during COVID-19. Restaurants and hotels across the state received a check from the government for 10 percent of their losses during COVID. That was an initiative we worked hard on, working with the governor’s office and with legislators, both the House and Senate, both sides of the aisle, to get across the finish line.
I wanted to ask you about the pandemic, because it feels like so much has shifted—there’s a really distinct ‘before’ and ‘after’ in the hospitality industry. I know the NCRLA has a focus on business owners, but given that the pandemic highlighted a lot of worker concerns, do you feel that the balance at the association has shifted at all regarding advocating for owners versus advocating for workers? And in general, do you feel that advocating primarily for owners’ interests ultimately benefits workers as well?
On March 17, 2020, restaurants were forced to shut down and hotels essentially shuttered: they could have guests, but no events were taking place. Business travel seized up. There were no meetings, conventions, events. On that day, we displaced about half of our workforce.
What’s interesting to me, and very telling, is that the one thing those business owners cared about most, as we were communicating, telling them that they had to shut down—you would think that they would have been most concerned about their own businesses, about their ability to pay their bills. The thing overwhelmingly they were most concerned about were the employees that they were having to send home.
As I reflect back on that moment in time, I’m reminded that our state’s unemployment system was overwhelmed with applicants. It shut down. And there were weeks before unemployment benefits began to take hold. In those very early days, this association, our members, raised over $1.2 million just in a matter of days in the early days of the pandemic, and we began writing checks to every displaced worker who reached out to us and needed support.
And then, obviously, it became important to help them apply for unemployment, and then as these businesses were able to open back up, to make sure that they could rehire as many of those workers as possible.
I will also say that we were able, with some of that COVID relief funding, to launch a campaign called Serving Careers, in which we reached out to North Carolinians to encourage them to consider careers in the hospitality industry. We have seen a tremendous rebuilding of our workforce.
One of the other things that happened after COVID is that wages increased significantly. It’s almost laughable now, but for years, we had this conversation around increasing the minimum wage. Well, today there’s nobody in our industry who makes minimum wage.
I’m glad you brought up wages, because I think—correct me if I’m wrong—but I think during your tenure, the minimum wage has technically stayed the same, even if most workers are making a higher amount on average: it’s still $7.25 in North Carolina, with $2.13 as the tipped minimum wage. Can you tell me about any advocacy work that the NCRLA has done around wages—do you advocate to keep the minimum wage the same, or push for increases? The NCRLA website explicitly supports the tip credit.
In North Carolina, we follow the federal minimum wage, as do many other states. And so that is currently $7.25, and that applies to all jobs, all wages, all sectors of our state’s economy. But I am proud that in North Carolina, most jobs in our industry pay significantly higher than that.
When we ran our Serving Careers campaign—and it is online today, you could go to the ServingCareers.com website and look at jobs that are currently posted in the industry—almost all of them pay a significantly higher wage. I don’t know of any—I mean, the wages are significantly higher than that in North Carolina, and I think that’s largely because employers know they have to pay that to attract good workers and to retain workers, and that’s become really important.
So I think that’s taken care of itself. Business owners don’t look to the government to mandate wages. They’re paying what it takes to recruit and retain workers, and that’s encouraging. That’s been a really good thing.
You were at the NCRLA during the first Trump administration. Now Trump is back, and ICE raids targeting immigrant workers at restaurants and hotels are happening again. I saw on the association’s website that y’all state support for a “pathway to legalization for undocumented workers.” I was curious if that translates at all to protecting workers who are still currently undocumented?
So ours is an industry that does employ a number of immigrants, largely because we accept people from all backgrounds and all experiences, and we give them a path to be successful. It’s sort of the American dream. People come and work in restaurants and hotels, and many of them stay for their entire career.
There are many temporary workers who come in under temporary visas and work in our industry, and we would like to see that expanded, the ability to hire more of those kinds of temporary workers. So far, we have not had complaints or concerns from our industry about raids in any of the restaurants or hotels in our state.
We do understand and respect what’s happening to remove people who have committed crimes. There may be illegal immigrants who’ve committed crimes, and they are already on a list to be deported. We are seeing a little bit of that happening, but I am not aware of a single raid in a restaurant or hotel in North Carolina.
We are working with legal professionals to make sure that our members, our business owners and operators, understand how to comply with current guidance
Looking at the broader landscape of North Carolina’s hospitality industry, are there any critical issues that you feel should be spotlighted right now that aren’t getting the attention that they deserve?
Our North Carolina General Assembly is in a long legislative session, and there is a long list of things that they’re currently working on. Many of those things impact our industry, either directly or tangentially. And so our lobbying team is over there every single day working on all those issues.
One of the things we continue to work on is alcohol reform in North Carolina, making it easier for mixed beverage permittees to secure liquor, the liquor that they need, to run meaningful beverage programs, to be able to get the kinds of liquor, specialty liquor products that they need, and to being able to buy from more than one location in the state. And so we continue to advocate around that, just trying to improve the efficiency of our ABC system.
There is a bill currently about ‘no tax on tips,’ something we’ve heard at the federal level. A bill similar to that has been introduced in North Carolina. We’re working with policy makers to understand how that would work, and to ensure to our employees that if, in fact, there’s no tax on tips, that that would not displace them from receiving things like unemployment insurance or disability insurance.
There was a bill introduced yesterday that would ban some sorts of food products in North Carolina. We’re trying right now to get more understanding about what that means: how would that be implemented? Who would enforce that? What kinds of things would we need to do to prepare for that?
This is kind of a curveball, but has the association done, or considered doing, any advocacy around marijuana legalization, given that it could create new revenue streams—cannabis tourism, cannabis-infused dining? Is this something that you think that your successor might have on their plate?
We have not done any work in that space, largely because we currently don’t see any movement to make recreational marijuana use available in North Carolina. But when and if that comes up, obviously, we will follow it closely.
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